The invention concerns a packaging container made of a one-piece cut-out blank of an essentially rigid sheet material, in particular, cardboard with a container body consisting of side walls connected at the longitudinal edges with each other and with a common rectangular base at four bottom edges.
Packaging containers of this fundamental design are known in different form of realization, for example as folding boxes, the container bottom of which is formed by a closure with insert straps or adhesively bonded closing flaps. Although folding boxes may be used in very broad fields of application, they are not suitable for example for tight, internally coated containers for liquids.
For the latter purpose, butt-ended bags made of plastic-metal composite sheets are used, which are folded while forming a container bottom in a manner such that they are in contact only with their coated insides and therefore may be made tight by edge sealing. However, the mechanical stability of such bags is low in view of the flexibility of the composites used. Their use is therefore restricted to liquids.
In a known packaging container of the abovementioned generic type (EP 16 848), the rectangular container bottom, which is also the support surface for the packaging container, is in the form of a container closure, preferably as a conventional folding box insert strap closure. The stability of this known packaging container is determined essentially by the strength of the closure forming the container bottom. Although the inherent stability of the upwardly tapering container body is very high and would permit the use of a relatively thin material, the configuration of the closure at the container bottom requires a certain minimum thickness and rigidity of the material used. In addition, this known packaging container may be used in the manner of a folding box only in view of its bottom closure, i.e. not as a tightly welded packaging container for liquids or flowable goods.
It is therefore the object of the invention to develop a packaging container of the abovementioned type so that it may be used for very different purposes, in particular as a container for liquids or flowable goods. The packaging container is to combine the advantageous properties of a folding box with those of a butt-ended bag, without their respective disadvantages.